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Three Viable Paths for Fixing Climate in Obama’s Second Term

With the 2012 election behind us, Auden Schendler, Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company (a BICEP member), wrote about 3 ways that President Obama could address climate change in his second term.

With the 2012 election behind us, Auden Schendler, Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company (a BICEP member), wrote in The Atlantic about three ways that President Obama could address climate change in his second term. Schendler says that it’s not enough to fix the problem after there’s been a crisis. With climate, the crisis just gets worse unless we focus on prevention and lowering our greenhouse gas emissions.

It has become abundantly clear that adaptation, the climate solution recommended by Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon, is a joke and a myth. "Adaptation" looks like lower Manhattan under four feet of water. The upside of that harsh truth is that government officials like Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, Obama, and maybe even Chris Christie, are beginning to realize what conservative Yale economist William Nordhaus has been saying for years: It's going to cost more not to deal with climate change than to fix it.

With that in mind, and knowing that Obama does see climate as a huge problem, it's possible he could pursue actual legislation to reel in carbon emissions.

Auden Schendler is Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company and author of the book Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution. Previously a sustainability researcher at Rocky Mountain Institute, Auden currently serves on the board of Protect Our Winters. He was named a global warming innovator by TIME magazine in 2006.